Ron Paul maybe a
long shot in November, but he's America's best bet on foreign
policy.By Michael Scheuer

May 08, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
-- Ron Paul's treatment by mainstream media, other Republican
hopefuls, and the punditry makes me think the W.B. Yeats
lines "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world" also describe the year 2012 in
the United States. Indeed, Paul's experience in the nomination
campaign suggests U.S. politics lacks reasoned substance, common
sense, and an understanding of what America's Founding Fathers
intended.

Open up
any newspaper to see the mess America has sunk itself into
around the world: for example,
facing off with China over a lone, non-American dissident
whose safety has no relation to U.S. security. Yet today, Paul's
call for staying out of other people's wars unless genuine U.S.
national interests are at stake
is deemed radical, immoral, even anti-American. Amazing.

If elected
president, Paul's most valuable contribution to a prosperous and
secure American future might well lie in his application of a
noninterventionist foreign policy, following the wishes of
George Washington and the other founders.

Before
explaining why Paul's foreign policy would benefit the United
States, it is worth rebutting those ill-educated jackasses in
politics, the media, and the academy who denigrate the founders
as "dead
white males." To them, the modern world is so different from
Washington's time that nothing the founders said or wrote
pertains to contemporary foreign-policymaking. Such self-serving
and ahistoric attitudes allow their advocates to pursue policies
negating the Constitution, piling up debt, and fueling
relentless intervention abroad.

Several
years ago, Georgetown University's distinguished professor
emeritus Daniel Robinson
cogently explained that the founding generation did not
prescribe specific policies for unforeseeable future problems,
but, rather, conducted a prolonged and profound seminar on "the
nature of human nature." They examined history and their own
experiences and devised a set of principles true not only in
their own era and in ancient Sparta, but also for the unknowable
American future: Human nature never changes; man is not
perfectible; individuals and governments must live within their
means; man is hard-wired for conflict; and small government,
frequent elections, and secure private property best protect
liberty. Most crucial today is the principle that foreign
interventions when no genuine U.S. interest is at risk will
yield lost wars, deep debt, and decreased domestic liberty.
These common-sense principles were the key to national security
in the early republic and would regain that status in a Paul
presidency.

A
President Paul would infuse these principles into U.S. foreign
policy and produce a noninterventionist doctrine: far fewer
unnecessary and costly wars, far fewer dead soldiers, and far
greater U.S. national security. This is a workable, adult
approach to the world -- especially the Muslim world -- unlike
the adolescent approach America's bipartisan governing elite has
hewed to for decades.

What the
founders and Paul advocate, and what the U.S. political elite
have forgotten, might be termed the "Schoolyard Rule." Most of
us, in the halcyon days of youth, learned at recess that every
action elicits a reaction: Push someone in the schoolyard, and
you will be pushed back. We also learned that a single, cavalier
push meaning little to you might quickly turn into a bigger
fracas, complete with cuts, bruises, or worse, until Sister Mary
Lawrence and her metal-edged yardstick arrived to stop the fight
and restore order.

We also
learned the Schoolyard Rule's corollary: If you are pushed
during recess, you better push back -- even if the instigator is
bigger -- and hope that the good sister arrives to save your
bacon. If you do not push back, the pain you receive becomes a
daily occurrence. Militant Islamists assiduously apply this
corollary to defend a Muslim world they perceive as too-long
passive in the face of murderous superpower pushing. The
Islamists are pushing back and depending on Allah -- in the role
of Sister Mary Lawrence -- to give eventual victory to the
Muslim David.

This
action-reaction lesson is a key part of a youngster's practical
education, and in the course of his or her pre-college schooling
the Schoolyard Rule is reinforced by courses in subjects like
history, physics, religion, and chemistry. At high school
graduation, most American teenagers have a handle on the idea
that if you push, you will be pushed back, and are confident
that this is an iron law. When was the last time you met a
schoolyard Gandhi?

But then
comes college. The unfortunates who trundle off to Yale,
Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere in the Ivy League are cleansed
of the Schoolyard Rule's common sense, emerging four years later
with few contact points with reality. They have learned to shape
policies for the world they want, not the one on offer. They
believe it their duty to use whatever tool available, be it
laws, bayonets, or cruise missiles, to turn the world's people
into semi-socialist, spendthrift, ahistoric, anti-religious
democrats -- in short, mirror images of themselves.

These Ivy
League graduates who have forgotten the Schoolyard Rule now
dominate U.S. foreign policy. Eager to push hard any person or
state they disagree with or dislike, they blithely assume the
pushed will know such punishment is indispensable in becoming as
smart, cool, and sophisticated as people like Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.

Nearly
alone among Republicans and Democrats, Paul knows that ignoring
the Schoolyard Rule, its corollary, and the founders' warning
against nonessential intervention in foreigners' affairs would
be ruinous for America. As president, Paul would push only if a
genuine U.S. national security interest were at stake. Wars
would be fought only over life-and-death matters -- like access
to energy and freedom of the seas -- and not over ephemera like
Israel's interests and women's rights and human rights overseas.

Paul would
listen to the enemy. Not to empathize or sympathize, but to
understand his motivation and form policy to defeat him,
ensuring the motivation of today's enemies is not passed to the
next generation. The failure of both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama
to understand that it is U.S. government actions in the Islamic
world that fire Islamist motivation, not hatred of freedom or
how Americans live at home, proves that only Paul's approach can
restore U.S. security. The Islamists have educated Americans
just as clearly and openly as Ho Chi Minh and General Giap did;
the United States' failure of perception has already ensured
that much of the next generation of young Muslims will become
Islamists.

A Ron Paul
presidency would reverse a half-century of Republican and
Democratic leaders maintaining national security policies that
lethally push Muslims, premised on the delusion they will not
push back. President Paul would replace the interventionism of
these men and women -- who are merely miseducated, not evil --
with the founders' guidance, the Schoolyard Rule, and a belief
that the federal government is an engine of national destruction
and bankruptcy. For President Paul, the protection of the United
States' genuine interests by avoiding unnecessary wars and
frivolous interventions is first, last, and always the main
foreign-policy priority of the U.S. government.

Michael
Scheuer, a Ron Paul supporter, was chief of the Osama bin Laden
unit at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999.